"Nous pleurerons pour toi, ma sœur. Dors bien," Sekhmet said, when the footage had concluded. Before anyone could ask what that meant she added, in common tongue: "Well, that sucks."

"Void..." Kore muttered, appropriately taken back by all she had just seen.

"Isn't that your cousin?" Jaheed said to Sekhmet – perhaps just a mite harsher than intended. "You don't have anything more to say than-"

"I have a lot of dead cousins," Sekhmet snapped, folding her arms. "Our entire purpose is to take bullets for you Highborn. This is just..." She gestured broadly. "The job. Shit, I barely even knew her." Even still, Kore was certain that she detected a hint of melancholy in the callous cyborg’s demeanor.

"Just ‘the job’," Jaheed repeated, still sounding surprisingly upset by that particular notion. Kore wondered to herself, then – though he had celebrated the death of his father, Jaheed had never once spoke of his brother and sister. And it was clear now that he was taking Sekhmet's disregard rather personally.

"How did they do it?" Diesch interrupted, unintentionally putting an end to a mounting argument. The man was still hunched forwards, chin resting upon folded hands, and studying that final image with microscopic scrutiny. Working the puzzle, it seemed, because that was the thing he did best.

"You mean how did they kill her?" Sekhmet asked, shooting Jaheed a final glare before turning fully to the reticent detective. Jaheed tensed, looked like he wanted to say something more – but Kore stilled him with a hand on the shoulder and a sympathetic look. Let it go, she mouthed, and reluctantly the Highborn agreed.

"That's exactly what I mean. Some sort of implement goes into her head, okay, then something hits her from behind – and then that's just it? Dead on the spot?" Diesch shook his head. "Se-dai are supposed to be made from sterner stuff than that." He pointed a mechanical finger at the screen. "Look, right before the footage cuts out. Her body goes limp before she dies."

"Yeah, I saw it," Sekhmet grunted, taking a seat on the couch beside him. "They probably stuck her with some sorta Scrambler Bolt."

Now everyone was looking at her with the question painted rather obviously on their faces. Sekhmet rolled her eyes.

"It's some Fifth War shit, from when the Se-dai were first rolled out as a military force," Sekhmet explained, as though this was all overwhelmingly obvious. "Up ‘til then we just bodyguards. But the Daeven were pushing the Old Empire hard and so they had us be assassins, too. And when every single one of the Daevan leaders were dropping dead they – too late – to staunch the bleeding with these ‘Scrambler Bolts’. They do exactly what you think they do. Scrambles our internals, forces our systems into a terminal shutdown. Get one of those stuck to you, and boom." She snapped her fingers. "Lights out."

"So why doesn't everyone just use these things?" Kore asked, then immediately regretted – the implication of everyone should want to kill Se-dai was pretty damn obvious, after all. But Sekhmet just shrugged, either unoffended or uncaring.

"Cuz they built my generation better," she said, with a hint of pride. "Not only is my carapace non-porous and non-conductive, but it's three layers now with all sorts of diffusive elements shoved in-between. Those old Scrambler Bolts wouldn't make it past layer one."

"Well obviously one did," Jaheed remarked dryly.

"Yeah," Sekhmet mused, turning back to the recording. "Technology's catching up, I suppose."

"Hey, hey," Diesch interrupted again, snapping his fingers rapidly. All turned now to see a still frame of the male cyborg's pale, red-eyed visage – leering down at stricken Ammit with a narrow smile. And then they saw it too, of course. The symbol of the Vzngtch tattooed just beneath his eye.

Kore and Sekhmet both opened their mouths to speak, but Jaheed had them beat.

"Motherfucker!" he spat.

Nobody really saw any need to chime in, then. Jaheed had captured the general sentiment well enough.

----------------------------------------

NINE HOURS LATER

It hurt like a bitch to wake up.

But alas, it was out of his hands – once Ket Sal's eyes started to flutter, the auto-injectors did the rest, and soon he was wide awake, internal alarms blaring as his vitals spiked wildly. Quickly, he silenced that damn infernal siren in his brain, only to realize soon after that the majority of the pain he was experiencing was in fact physical, not mental.

His head felt as though it were in a vise, even through the haze of several pain-numbing compounds. His skull pounded and throbbed in perfect time with his heart, compressing tighter and tighter with each beat until he was certain his brain would just outright explode.

Slowly, belatedly, those yellow eyes flicked around, taking stock of his confinement. The drexylmethanthomaline was doing a fine job of clearing his thoughts, though it was a painfully slow process all the same. The Scion was in a stark-lit room, featuring gray metal walls and gray metal ceiling and a gray metal door and not a whole lot else. He was, of course, sitting in a gray metal chair – a bold aesthetic choice, he thought somewhat deliriously to himself. His hands and feet were bound by what he immediately identified as nanotech shackles. These shackles did not so much close shut as they did conjoin together, forming a single unified strip of metal. There was no lock to pick, nothing of the sort – only a very particular electrical impulse would see the shackles deform once more.

So, that was far from ideal. And then...well, then came memories of the past few hours, and those were worse than a thousand headaches. Memories of Maít, who was missing. Memories of Ammit, who was dead. Maít, whom he would never see again. Ammit, whose last expression had been a rictus grin of drooling agony. His family, gone. Himself, alone.

Ket Sal commanded his body not to weep and so it did not, though his hands were trembling all the same. And thus, even as his mind cried out and screamed and wept and raged, roaring impotent fury and sobbing pleas for any deity who might be listening, outwardly Ket Sal just sat there, perfectly calm and composed.

This silent torment continued for perhaps an eternity before, finally, the door creaked open and the Vzngtch cyborg stepped into the room. Ket Sal’s pulse quickened at once at the sight of Ammit’s killer. Behind the pale-faced bastard there came a gaunt man with diamond-studded teeth, who gestured sharply with one hand.

"The door, Gaun," he ordered, and the cyborg shut it at once. Then came a slow dance, of the cyborg circling behind Ket Sal while the other man approached from the front, staring down at the captive Scion with naked hunger in his eyes.

Ket Sal met that stare, and there was no need to call upon his eidetic memory to identify who this was that stood before him. He guessed it at once.

"Az-Azsad," the Scion said, with a rueful smile. "Aren't you supposed to be Jaheed's problem?"

"The Scion Ket Sal," Az-Azsad replied. "Should you not be smarter than to end up in a place like this?"

"Shouldn't you be smarter than to go against the Jade Emperor?" Ket Sal countered smoothly, throwing on a mocking, superior grin. It took every bit of conditioning and cybernetics at his disposal to manage that, in his current position, but it helped to have had a great deal of practice with that particular expression. "We're old friends, you know. And the Emperor is a vengeful man indeed. You haven't seen," his grin grew even wider, "the hate that Doss Ken Volsif is capable of. You haven't seen him as I've seen him. He won't just exterminate your people, melt your world, erase your history..." He paused for effect. "He'll wipe this whole fucking backwater system off the map. It’ll be like you never existed at all."

"A possibility," Az-Azsad admitted. And then Gaun squeezed Ket Sal's shoulder and he had just an instant to remember it had been previously dislocated before the pain came roaring up to meet him. It was so intense as to be quite literally blinding. This continued for several seconds until, finally, Gaun released him, and Ket Sal slumped forward, panting and drenched in sweat.

More alarms were blaring inside his head.

"You don't actually mean...to interrogate me...do you?" Ket Sal managed, between heaving breaths. "You think this...is my first time...under the knife?" He scoffed, spat out a glob of phlegm. "Please. I am a-"

Gaun hit him again. Black spots appeared in vision.

"I am the voice of the Emperor-"

Gaun hit him a third time. Alarms were cropping up faster than he could dismiss them.

"Heh heh," Ket Sal chuckled, somewhat deliriously. There was a thick line of blood dribbling from his mouth. "Heh..." This was nothing. Ket Sal had been under the knife a half-dozen times before, and he had undergone a level of torture-conditioning that made this seem almost pleasant.

"All I want," that damned Az-Azsad was saying, in that damned annoying accent of his, "is for you to speak free. All I want is to ask questions."

As though that were not already obvious. A Scion's mind was a veritable treasure-trove of information, an invaluable lexicon into the myriad dealings of the Jade Emperor himself. In Ket Sal's skull there could be found the keys to the Great Domain itself – and they were guarded only by the willpower of a single man. A man who had, in the last twenty-four hours, lost everything he held dear.

Perhaps for some, in his position, it might have been tempting to give in. After all, what point was there to any of this? Ket Sal didn't give even a fraction of a shit about the Great Domain. He hated just about every one of the other Scions. Doss was all but unrecognizable to him now. The only two people he could ever even tolerate were both dead – so why bother? Why endure this torture any longer?

But Ket Sal didn't think like that. To Ket Sal, all that mattered was that these two men had killed Maít and Ammit. And so his only purpose, for the remainder of his short and miserable life, would be to hurt these two men in every way he could possibly conceive of. Even if the only injury he could inflict upon them was his own silence. He was an avatar of undiluted hatred and little more, even as he still flashed the ganglord that same old mocking, fraternal smile. He knew that others found the look profoundly irritating and hoped with all his heart that Az-Azsad felt the same.

They beat him for hours on end. Metal fists pounded against his flesh with a cyborg's terrible precision – always hitting just as hard as possible without actually breaking something. And then, when his entire body was a mass of discolored bruising, Gaun brought the knife out, and so they set to carving his flesh – careful all the while to avoid damaging his face. This, too, Ket Sal endured for some time. This was no matter of conditioning, or an unusually high pain tolerance. It was Ket Sal's hatred that served as his lantern in the dark, his north star by which he could guide himself through oceans of agony and madness both.

Never once did he come even close to breaking.

And so, after several hours Az-Azsad stepped back, lip curling with irritation and disgust, and snapped his fingers.

"Bring her in," he ordered.

Ket Sal's blood ran cold.

No.

The door swung open.

Oh no.

Gaun was hefting another chair, and now he slammed it down before him.

No, no, no, no, no.

The cyborg left, for a moment, then returned with another in tow.

She was made to sit, and Ket Sal found himself staring right into Maít's eyes. Beautiful eyes. Eyes he could gaze at for hours, days, weeks. Eyes in which you could see a whole galaxy, if you knew how to look. Eyes that were bloodshot, now, and red-rimmed with tears.

Still she was putting on a brave face, despite it all, her expression haughty and unbowed – though anyone with eyes as keen as Ket Sal’s could see at once that the woman was absolutely terrified.

Ket Sal knew exactly what he had to do next. He would not fail her.

The Scion turned to Az-Azsad and made a noise of disgust.

"Really?" Ket Sal scoffed, through bloodied lips and broken teeth. "Now you're bringing out the concubine?"

"Now we bring out your wife," Az-Azsad corrected, hands clasped behind his back. He seemed quite pleased with himself. "We will not hurt you any more, Ket Sal." He turned his head. "Now, we will hurt her. Unless...?"

Ket Sal sat so still that he may well have been a corpse. The thoughts roiling within his head were all but unspeakable.

"Go ahead, waste your time," he shrugged, casually, after a moment. "I don't give a shit about some whore."

"You fucking bastard," Maít blurted out, speaking up for the first time through rage-gritted teeth. Her eyes were wide with fury, and she struggled madly at her restraints. "I am not getting tortured for this void-damned son of a bitch!" Maít had always been an exceptional actress, and now she was performing gracefully under the worst pressure imaginable. Ket Sal's heart surged with momentary pride, tempered at once by the agony of their situation. Why did they have to be here? Why couldn’t the two of them just be anywhere other than here?!

"It's ridiculous, I know," Ket Sal sighed, rolling his eyes. "But this stupid bastard is out of options, so all he can do is cut up my fucktoy and pray that I caught feelings for it." He let out a cruel, bitter laugh. "Bad luck for you, I suppose."

"I should have killed you, that night," Maít swore, voice thick with venom. "You know the one. You remember what you did. I should have smothered you in your sleep."

"Probably," Ket Sal admitted, nonplussed. And then Gaun stepped forward and punched her square in the jaw.

Maít's head snapped back, and Ket Sal's mask broke for just a fraction of an instant. On pure reflex he surged against the restraints, alarms blaring for the millionth time as his facial system worked overtime to reconstitute itself. One of her teeth clattered against the top of Ket Sal's shoe and his fingernails dug long, shrill furrows into the arms of the chair.

"This is what you want?" Az-Azsad asked, gesturing to Maít. But, before Ket Sal could respond, Maít just glared up and hawked a glob of blood onto the man's face.

"Fuck you," Maít spat. And then she tilted her head back and made clear those would be her final words.

Silently, Az-Azsad reached up and wiped away the saliva with one thumb. Then, he gave Ket Sal a look.

"You sure?" he asked, again.

"I really couldn't care less," Ket Sal lied.

And so Gaun set to work upon Maít, much as he had upon Ket Sal. And it took everything – everything the Scion had to maintain that mask of arrogant indifference as the love of his life was beaten bloody before him. He wanted to cry out, wanted to weep and scream and gnash his teeth. He wanted more than he had ever wanted anything in all his long life to tell her that he loved her and that he was sorry – but he could not. He had to play to his outs, had to make the percentage play, and he knew the only way Maít could possibly survive this would be if somehow the I-don't-really-give-a-fuck routine actually worked. Which, of course, it wouldn’t. Yet still it was their only chance and so Ket Sal was forced to just smile along as Gaun put a long, curved dagger against his wife’s eye.

Maít was babbling madly, now, spilling everything she possibly could – which, by design, was essentially nothing. She was brave and strong-willed and cunning beyond compare but at the end of the day she was just an ordinary human, one with none of Ket Sal's innumerable advantages. Though the option had always existed, he had long refused to sign her up for torture conditioning – unwilling, as he was, to subject her to that horrible agony. Now he regretted it with every fiber of his broken being.

"Should we take the eye?" Az-Azsad asked. He sounded almost angry now. Perhaps he was growing impatient, Ket Sal thought to himself. "Or will you finally speak proper?"

"For the last time," Ket Sal sighed, sounding utterly exasperated. "I really, truly do not give a fuck."

And then the knife went in and finally the conditioning broke and Ket Sal was thrashing against the restraints like a wild animal, eyes wide and spittle flying from his mouth. "I'll kill you!" he screamed, his voice hoarse and shredded. "I'll kill every last fucking one of you! I swear by the void-"

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

And Maít, too, was shrieking in pain as Gaun smoothly retracted the knife from her skull. He and Az-Azsad both gave the Scion a bemused smile as Ket Sal leaned forward, whispering in pitiful tones to a shaking Maít.

"I love you," he whimpered, because it was all he could say. "I'm sorry, Maít, I'm so sorry. It's gonna be okay. Everything is gonna be okay."

Maít just sobbed, her right eye reduced to a mass of oozing blood. What else could she do? What else could any of them possibly do?

And then, suddenly, both Az-Azsad and Caun's heads snapped up as one.

"Front gate," Caun reported.

"Talk outside," Az-Azsad snapped.

And then their captors were gone, and the two of them were alone.

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NINE HOURS PRIOR

"Well," Jaheed said, clasping his hands together. "We need to get out of here – that much is now abundantly clear."

"It won’t be safe to hail the Cloud Gorger," Kore agreed, unholstering her pistol and checking the ammunition count. All four of them were on their feet now, arming and armoring themselves as best they could. The air within the penthouse was one of subdued alarm, of a looming storm soon to come. "But I know Tarsus always keeps her running hot on the first night. If we can just make it there-"

"They'd come for the Gorger first," Diesch interrupted, which was unfortunately a very good point. "They'll be waiting for us."

"That motherfucker Az-Azsad," Jaheed muttered, still furious. Sekhmet just offered what was lately her favorite gesture – a casual shrug of the shoulders.

"Who cares?" the Se-dai said. "Ship's our only way outta here. We should just shut up and get moving already.”

"So we just throw open the door, walk into a hail of gunfire?" Kore said dryly. Sekhmet shrugged again.

"I can just go on ahead," she offered. “Clear ‘em out for ya.”

"We can't just..." Jaheed trailed off, gesturing animatedly. "We can't just have an apostate Se-dai running around, killing people in broad daylight!"

"Nighttime," Sekhmet corrected, for whatever that was worth. Jaheed rolled his eyes.

"Vzngtch already has a regular cyborg, no?" Kore countered, heading off a burgeoning dispute. "Let’s just say that we do, too."

"We've got no choice but to use her," Diesch agreed, still studying that footage as he spoke. "We're dead if we don't. So yeah, lets bite the bullet and go already."

Jaheed hesitated, weighed the options. Came to the obvious conclusion – sighed – and turned reluctantly to the rogue Se-dai.

"Guns only," he ordered firmly, fixing her with a stare. "Nothing an ordinary human couldn't do. Understand?"

Silently, Kore unholstered her disruptor pistol and handed it over. Sekhmet looked down at the weapon with vague disgust – but took it anyway as Kore stepped away to retrieve something.

"You do know how to shoot one of those, yes?" Jaheed arched an eyebrow.

"Do I know how to shoot one of those," Sekhmet mocked. Behind her, Kore was returning with a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. "I'm a Se-dai, for fuck's sake. There is literally nothing that I cannot kill with."

Kore threw the bag down onto the counter, unzipped it – and withdrew a long, lithe, quad-barrel slug shotgun. It was an enormous weapon, almost as tall as she was.

"Come on, then," Kore said, snapping the weapon shut and slinging a bandolier of red-striped shells over her shoulder. "Time's wasting."

----------------------------------------

The crew of the Cloud Gorger made it five feet out the door before they were stopped by a trio of Vzngtch guards. Behind them, a neighboring door creaked open, and two more quietly emerged. They looked like concerned protectors, not dangerous guards, and their weapons were all quite tastefully concealed. It was, all things considered, a rather polite form of house arrest.

"Lord Vell-se," the lead man said, bowing his head. Kore saw quite clearly the outline of the pistol inside his jacket. "Is everything all right?"

"Quite alright, yes," Jaheed smiled pleasantly. "We were just going out for a bit of fresh air."

"I see," the lead man said, eyes darting back for just a fraction of a second. "Well-"

His hand twitched for the gun – and without further ado Kore raised her shotgun and blew a hole clean through his chest. Lightning-fast, Sekhmet whipped around and felled the two behind her with precise shots to the temples as Kore rammed the butt of her shotgun against the fourth's face and Diesch shot the fifth right through the eye.

The lone survivor doubled over, coughing and hacking, and Kore just grabbed him by the back of the collar and slammed him against the closest wall.

All four barrels of her shotgun went under his chin, and he stared now with wide and terrified eyes as Jaheed stepped up and gave him the exact same pleasant smile as before.

"We're going to return to our shuttle, now," Jaheed said, magnanimously. He tilted his head to the side. "Should we be expecting any trouble?"

----------------------------------------

And so the hovercar sped off, thankfully unhindered. Sekhmet had ripped both the tracker and the bomb off of their engine mount and now they were flying free, well on their way to the hangar in which the Cloud Gorger yet slumbered. Thankfully – if the unfortunate Vzngtch guard was to be believed – the Gorger was merely being watched by a compliment of enforcers. The ship was as of yet untouched and Tarsus was as of yet none the wiser.

"Boring," Sekhmet yawned, from the passenger seat. "I hope they send that cyborg after us."

Kore couldn't say she felt the same – in fact, she felt very much the exact opposite. Sekhmet's nigh-immortality had always been a given, an obvious assumption given her nature. There were plenty of things that could take her away, sure, but few if any that could actually kill her. This was the woman, after all, for whom a hangar full of assassins had been little more than an excuse to show off for her girlfriend.

But now Kore had just watched a fully armed and armored Se-dai actually die – and Sekhmet hadn't even been phased. The danger had taken on a new shade entirely, one that Kore found markedly unpleasant. That little seed of worry in her heart was growing, day by day.

Nevertheless, the hovercar pulled into the hangar with little issue. Jaheed blustered their way through several security checkpoints and thus the Gorger now sat before them, engines humming just as Kore had assumed they would be – just as doors hissed open behind them and a dozen Vzngtch enforcers stormed in with pistols and blades in hand.

Kore, Diesch, and Sekhmet all raised their weapons as one – and while Kore shot two and Diesch got one, it was Sekhmet who did the lion's share of the work, picking off eleven with rote mechanical precision before any one of the enforcers could even raise their guns.

"Bo-ring," Sekhmet whined, as thirteen smoking bodies hit the ground, and everyone else decided they would rather rush into the ship than try offer any sort of disagreement.

"Fuck was that about?" Tarsus demanded as they stormed onto the bridge. The Gorger’s captain was already at the helm and already firing up the secondary thrusters.

"The Vzngtch are traitors to the Domain," Jaheed replied, settling into the navigator's seat and strapping himself in. "They kidnapped Ket Sal and killed his Se-dai – which, I mean, good riddance. But they were about to do the same to us."

"Huh," was all Tarsus said, as the Cloud Gorger began to rise. "Well, like you said, good riddance. Ket Sal was an asshole, no?"

"Asshole is an understatement," Jaheed growled. Everyone was settled and strapped in, now. "If nothing else, I'm more than happy to be leaving him in Vzngtchian hands.”

And then the Cloud Gorger's engines were blazing as the vessel ripped free from the hangar, ignored all hails or orders to stop, and shot off up into the lower atmosphere.

Just like that, it was over.

And yet...

Kore, sitting now in her seat as the ship rattled around her, was thinking about why she was here in the first place. Why she was wearing an Imperial uniform, why she was joined at the hip with a Highborn, why her eyes were no longer the ones she had been born with. All of it.

With you by my side, Kore, we'll fix everything.

That was why she was here. To do everything in her power to support Jaheed and to elevate him to a position from where he could do the most possible good. That was her mission, her entire purpose for being here. And right now, what she saw – clear as day – was a missed opportunity.

"Stay in low orbit," she ordered Tarsus, suddenly, and Jaheed turned to regard her with furrowed brow.

"What are you doing?" he demanded – but Kore just shook her head.

"We shouldn't leave him," she declared.

"Who?" Jaheed's brow furrowed even harder. "Wait-you mean Ket Sal? Why?! That son of a bitch actively wants me dead! I wouldn’t be surprised if he sent those damned assassins!"

"Exactly!" Kore practically shouted back. "Don't you see the opportunity here? Don't you see the very, very, very easy way we could turn an enemy into a friend?"

"Easy?" Diesch scoffed, as Jaheed violently shook his head.

"He murdered-" the Acolyte started.

"You need allies," Kore interrupted, leaning forward and jabbing her finger on the arm of her chair. "You need connections. And Ket Sal is as close to the Emperor as it gets! Think about all the ways he could help you!"

"Or all the ways he could turn around and stab me in the back, once I’ve saved his hide," Jaheed snarled. "He's a Scion, Kore. He isn't even human."

"Is your uncle human?" Kore asked plainly.

For a moment, there was only the rattling of the floor and the humming of the Gorger's engines.

"I don't know," Jaheed admitted, finally.

"Me neither," Kore agreed. "But we can’t pass this up. We can’t. And, hey, think about it – how's it gonna look to the Emperor, at the end of all this? His Scion fucked up and got captured, while his Acolyte swooped in and put the entire situation right. You're practically doing Ket Sal's job for him." And from Kore, then, there came a rare, genuine smirk.

"You gotta admit, the look on his face is gonna be pretty funny," Sekhmet chimed in, equally as eager to support her partner as she was to kill more Vzngtch.

Kore saw in his eyes that she had him, then. That old spark of ambition had flared up inside him and now he would not rest until he got exactly what he wanted. Still, he made a brief show of considering before asking, pointedly: "Well, how do we even find him?"

"We're doing this?" Diesch interrupted, for the first time. There was an uncharacteristic hint of eagerness to the former detective's voice. "We're committing to it, Jaheed?"

"Fuck it," Jaheed confirmed, nodding his head. "We're all in."

"Then give me fifteen minutes and I'll have his location," Diesch said, and then before anyone could ask he was already pulling up a dozen different screens and going through Ammit's last transmission, frame by frame, his fingers dancing nimbly across a holographic keyboard as his eyes darted back and forth.

The Black Hound, it seemed, was back on the hunt.

"Okay," Kore started, unstrapping and rising to her feet now as Tarsus began altering the Cloud Gorger's course. "This is almost certainly going to get very messy and very violent, which means we need your help." She turned to Sekhmet, and the Se-dai gave her a decidedly flirtatious grin.

"But the Scion cannot know that we have a fugitive Se-dai, or all this is for nothing," Kore continued, and Sekhmet's expression flipped at once. "That means guns-only."

"Come on," Sekhmet complained, tilting her head back, while Jaheed unstrapped himself as well.

"Except for the cyborg," the Acolyte added, eyes flicking between the two women. "If you see him, Sekhmet, all bets are off. I don't want you to end up like poor Ammit."

"Is that going to be a problem, by the way?" Kore chimed in. Jaheed was worried for the loss of a valuable asset; Kore's concerns were rooted in something far more personal. "Can you even beat him?"

"Of course I can beat him," Sekhmet snapped, impatiently tapping a finger against the hilt of her sword. "He's a janky, shitty, third-rate outer ring cyborg working for common criminals." She scoffed. "I'm a fucking Se-dai. He only beat her with that Scrambler Bolt and now that I've seen it, he'll never tag me with it. No Se-dai falls for the same trick twice." Her eyes flicked back to Diesch, to the video of her cousin meeting a gruesome end. "Ammit got unlucky. I won’t."

Kore just leaned back, unconvinced, and folded her arms – marinating in her worry for the time being as Jaheed continued to speak.

"Well, I'm convinced," he said, looking to Kore. The taller woman gave him a reluctant nod. "On that note – Ammit's corpse. Is there any use in trying to retrieve it?"

"It'd be way too heavy to carry-" Kore started.

"It'd probably make the Scion happy if we revived her," Sekhmet said, at the same time – and now both the Highborn and his bodyguard were staring at her, the same question forming on both their lips.

"You said she was dead..." Kore trailed off.

"She is," Sekhmet agreed. She reached up, brushed her hair aside, and tapped at the trio of scars left by Kore's impromptu execution. "So was I."

"So she's not dead...?" Jaheed asked.

"She is quite thoroughly deactivated," Sekhmet replied, briefly adopting a mocking Highborn-styled affectation. "But she's also Se-dai. The spike through her skull is less than ideal, sure, but all a Scrambler Bolt does is force her systems into emergency shutdown. We could probably boot her back up," she snapped her fingers, "just like that."

Jaheed opened his mouth to reply – just as Diesch called out "I got it," and already he was reciting coordinates for Tarsus' benefit as the others crowded around at once. On his display screen was just that – a glowing point on a map, what appeared to be a sort of armored compound amidst a run-down northern city district.

"How the hell did you find that out?" Jaheed demanded, impressed and a little baffled.

"Simple," Diesch replied, without a hint of irony. "Went through the video frame-by-frame, caught the reflection of a statue in the window. Cross-referenced every major landmark with every hotel in the northern district, narrowed it down pretty quick. Picked out the right one by cross-referencing public images of different penthouse interiors." He licked his lips, which was little surprise as this was more than he had spoken in months.

"From there," Diesch said, to his captivated audience, "I just started digging into footage from the nearest traffic-cam."

"Isn't that stuff secured?" Kore asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Barely, yeah," Diesch admitted. "But they own the entire planet – no point in locking things down too tight. Sure enough, a run-of-the-mill brute-force program got me the password in no time. From there, I found footage of the Scion being loaded into a vehicle, then stitched a hundred different traffic cams together until I had their route charted out. Wasn't perfect, but..." Again, he licked his lips. "I was able to fill in the rest. The honest answer is that there's a ninety-percent chance that compound is where we'll find him. But if you want my real answer?" He clicked his tongue and said, with the easy certainty of a true expert: "Ket Sal is there. That's a fact."

And then, abruptly, Diesch seemed violently uncomfortable at being the center of attention and turned away, mumbling something to himself as he tapped away on his keyboard once more.

Jaheed and Kore shared a look.

"Fantastic work, Diesch," Jaheed said, which was really the only sensible response. The Black Hound merely grunted. "Well then. How far out are we?"

"Nine hours," Tarsus replied, as data and trajectories zipped around her head. "I've got us fully Shrouded, by the way, and there's a drone headed for orbit right now just blaring our hull signature. I'll betcha ten-to-one the Vzngtch aren't running any sorta analog tracking equipment. They'll take the bait," she laughed. "Even though all they gotta do to see us is step outside and look up."

And then, curiously, there was no further discussion to be had. One by one, the crew of the Cloud Gorger went their separate ways – to rest, to meditate, and to prepare. Because it was dawning upon all five of them now that they were willingly leaping into the maw of the beast itself, all for the favor of a man who it seemed knew only malice in his heart.

It was all one hell of a gamble.

----------------------------------------

NINE HOURS AND FORTY-FIVE MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE

"I'm sorry," Ket Sal said, over and over again. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm-"

"It's okay," Maít said, her voice somehow coming out not half as shaky as his own. "Ket. Ket. Stop it, Ket. It's okay." Finally, her words got through to him, and the Scion sagged like a deflated balloon, his chest heaving with each and every agonized breath. It wasn't just his body; his mind was pushed to the absolute limit and begging for release. Yet he would not allow himself to slip into unconsciousness. He would not. These were perhaps the last moments he would ever spend alone with the love of his life.

"Ammit's dead, then?" Maít asked, snapping Ket Sal from his stupor, and the Scion could only give a mute nod in response. Maít's lip quivered but she, too, nodded resolutely. "I figured. That's the only way you'd be here, after all. Over her dead body."

"I let her down," Ket Sal muttered, to himself.

"You did no such thing," Maít said sharply. "Look at me, Ket. Look at me." Belatedly, he forced himself to do so. "Is there help on the way? Is there anyone who will notice we're missing?"

"Not for ten thousand light-years," Ket Sal chuckled bitterly. "The only ally we’ve got is Jaheed Vell."

A long pause, from Maít. Then: "Ah."

"Yeah."

"Not coming to rescue us, is he?"

"I highly doubt it."

"Well," Maít said, forcing a sad smile. "This is it, then."

"Yeah," Ket Sal agreed. "This is it." He tried to match her smile and found that he couldn't. He just...couldn't. His implants were entirely shut down, now, the alarms having all gone deathly quiet. All the lights were out. Everything was coming to a close.

"I want you to know," Maít continued, leaning forwards, "that I had fun. Do you hear me, Ket Sal? I had so much void-damned fun with you." Her one remaining eye shone like the brilliance of the moon, just as they had when he first met her. Void, even now he could remember that night with perfect clarity. "I would do it all over again. In a heartbeat."

"I love you," Ket Sal said, because there was nothing else to say.

"I love you too-" Maít said – just as the door flew open behind her and a cacophony of gunfire filled the air. The door slammed shut and the man on the other side – a panting, wide-eyed Vzngtch guard – stared at them both now with naked terror in his eyes.

"You yellow-eyed freak!" the guard screamed, his voice shrill with panic as he stormed over and shoved the barrel of a las-pistol against Ket Sal's skull. "What the hell have you done?"

It took Ket Sal just a moment to piece it all together – the gunfire, the fear, all of it. But when he did, the bloodied smile that split his face was – for the first time all day – a genuine one.

"You're fools," the Scion cackled, and in that moment he was a Scion again. No powerless victim, nothing of the sort – but one of the most powerful and dangerous men in all the Great Domain. He was a demigod. A veritable fucking demigod here, in the flesh. "You're all fools! You, your friends, your boss – you're all already dead. Your fates were sealed the moment you dared lay hands upon a Scion of the Jade Emperor."

"Who's coming?!" the Vzngtch demanded, eyes widening even further. The gun barrel was shaking wildly. "What the hell is going on?"

Ket Sal had no idea why Jaheed had come to rescue him – but one thing he did understand was that all this was very, very funny.

"How the fuck should I know?" Ket Sal sneered in reply, knowing now that there was indeed a tiny silver of a chance. And a sliver of a chance, after all, was all he’d ever needed to move mountains. "I've just been sitting here this whole time."